Experimental and numerical investigation for steel shear panels of modular bridge

Shear truss steel panels are the main constituents in the construction of modular steel Bailey bridges. Buckling characteristics, and ultimate capacity of the panels are the main design parameters to be rationally predicted. The present paper presents full-scale tests on two types of typical shear panels. In addition, two distinctive three-dimensional finite element models were developed to analyze the response of the tested shear panels using beam-column elements and shell elements, which represent the simplified macro and micro modeling techniques, respectively. Both the eigenvalues (buckling) analysis and the nonlinear response analysis were conducted to predict both the buckling characteristic, and ultimate capacities, respectively. Correlation between predicted buckling loads from different modeling techniques revealed that to introduce an adjustment length factor K in the AASHTO-LRFD standards to accommodate rational end conditions and lengths of the compression members. Furthermore, the study revealed that the conservative prediction of buckling load stemmed from the method employed to calculate the buckling length, which leads to a conservative estimate of the compressive strength.